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film review: shadowman

Mention street art nowadays and most will picture the
enigmatic Banksy: a little girl with a heart-shaped balloon or a protester
about to hurl a bouquet instead of a Molotov cocktail, painted on the side of a
building. His art often has a subversive undercurrent yet it intends to inspire
conversation, rather than fear. But in New York City in the 1980’s, when the street
art movement had just begun with artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel
Basquiat, one of his predecessors was forging a lucrative career with decidedly
darker images.

Oren Jacoby’s new documentary Shadowman tells the story of Richard Hambleton, a formally-trained painter
turned street artist who first came to the public’s attention in the late 70’s
with his “Mass Murder” series that stretched across the United States and
Canada. Using his friends as models, Hambleton would paint out chalk outlines
of a fictitious victim, splattering the scene with carmine paint. Passerby were
often unaware of the artistic nature of what they’d just walked over, looking
for non-existent police tape or sidestepping eerily realistic pools of blood.
In the 1980’s he gained notoriety for his “Shadowmen”, hulking outlines
splashed on the walls of side streets and dark alleys, crude and rough-edged as
only the most meticulously envisioned art can be. They gave the impression of
urban predators ready to pounce and often gave pedestrians a start. In 1984 he
painted several of these Shadowmen on the Berlin Wall and enjoyed international
recognition for much of the decade. By all accounts his star was in its
ascendancy.

Richard Hambleton alongside one of his famous "Shadowmen"

The success would not last, though. What began as a
retrospective on the emergence of an innovative new artist shifts into a woeful
portrait of addition and those who enable its continuance. Despite his
paintings selling in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, Hambleton
bled cash. Drug abuse cost him a supportive girlfriend and eventually relegated
him to semi-homelessness, living on the street or squatting in between
charitable offers from his admirers. Their goodwill, however, often looks
suspiciously like thinly concealed avarice. Collectors and gallery owners would
put Hambleton up in apartments or luxury hotels, all expenses covered; in
exchange, he agreed to provide new artwork for them at regular intervals. After
a few months, these arrangements would inevitably fall apart.

Although these well-heeled benefactors fancy themselves
“patrons” their benevolence does little to foster success. Hambleton no longer
scrapes by, true, but he’s still an addict, now with access to large sums of
money. Several of these patrons sit down for interviews in Shadowman. Many of them, when addressing the end of their financial
involvement with Hambleton, bemoan how what they did was never enough. How he
failed to produce the agreed-upon works, regardless of the support provided. He
was, in short, beyond their help. But was he? Luxury suites and large checks are
waved around like magic wands, yet no one even alludes to attempts at
professional intervention. Perhaps Hambleton was a lost cause no matter what;
by the time of his re-emergence in 2009, he had been struggling with addiction
for nearly 30 years. Or perhaps, with the right support, he stood a fighting
chance; with Hambleton’s passing last month, it’s a “what if?” left regrettably
to the past.

Hambleton doesn’t lack self-awareness. His contemporaries
Haring and Basquiat both passed away young. He seems resigned to his addiction
and its consequences: “I was alive when I died,” he flatly tells the camera.
His former girlfriend, Mette Madsen, posits that maybe the turmoil and the art
are inextricably linked. To banish one would be to banish the other as well. Witnessing Hambleton’s slow deterioration,
it’s left to the audience to decide whether the steep cost of genius is
justified.